A Warning To All Young Men...

     My wife, who is several years older than I am, has been married before. I met her the same year she married her first husband. He was a real piece of work. He regretted the marriage immediately. He regretted marrying young and not partying and playing the field. He seemed to take out his unhappiness on her through out the marriage. He never hit her or anything, but he did do his best to make her as miserable in the marriage as he was. I think his goal was to get her to leave him so that he could look like the victim. It took a few years for him to finally man up enough to just say he wanted out.

     My wife knew that the marriage would end sooner rather than later. What she did not know is that her husband had been accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Even though she tried to mentally prepare herself for the end of her marriage, when the end came, it threw her into a tail spin.

     She couldn't think clearly and just wanted the whole thing to be over. And so she gave him an uncontested divorce. He walked away scot-free, and there she was left with over $20,000 in credit card debt.

     She and I married a few years later. I was in my early twenties. She was in her late twenties.  I knew she had credit card debt. But I also knew that she had been working on paying it down for years while living with her parents. After we  married I found out that she had mostly been paying the minimum payments and was thus still over $20,000 in debt.

     At the beginning of our marriage, I had some employment problems. Some of them were my fault. Some of them weren't. I had two extended periods of unemployment, and several shorter periods. Even though my wife always had a full time job, because we were already in debt, we struggled to pay our bills, Our $20,000 grew to almost $40,000. Later, unpreventable medical bills would add almost another $7000.

Choosing to go into debt, means choosing to forgo having stacks of cash. Trust me, stacks of  cash are cooler.

     By fall 2016 we will have most of our debt paid off. We should be debt free before 2018. We've been paying on it for over a decade. It has sucked the life out of us. After more than 10 years of marriage we don't have a house.  All of our furniture was given to us. The majority of the pots and pans we own were given to us. In fact most of our belonging, except our clothes, were given to us. It is an act of God that our older car is still running.

     I said all of that to say this. Men, especially you young men, stay away from credit card debt. If you want to put your monthly fuel expenditures on a credit card and pay it off at the end of the month, then fine. But do not go out and buy rounds for all your buddies. Don't charge that new couch for your apartment. Whatever it is, don't charge it.

     I'm not a minimalist. Want a new TV that is so big that is covers one whole wall of your living room? Fine. Want a new computer? Fine. Want a new rifle? Fine. Or maybe you want to take your family on a Caribbean cruise? All of that is fine, but save up the cash before you make the purchase.

     Trust me on this, accumulating credit card debt is much easier than paying it off.